Everything’s New

It was 2018. I was coming out of a low point. Months of struggling at church in 2017 resulted in starting over somewhere new. I was holding my new daughter, who an an infant was already one of the most determined people I knew. I had turned the corner on another big trial, one only my closest friends knew about. And I was listening to the new version of a song from my favorite band which had recently broken up (as all my favorite bands seem to do), performed this time by the band leader by himself. With the song playing on the laptop there in the kitchen, I danced with my little baby girl and sang along with Paul Meany:

Everything’s new, everything’s new
Beautiful city lights look bright tonight
And calling out for you,
Everything’s new
Everything’s

With its melancholic sound and hopeful lyrics, it had become something like my theme song for a time. For better or worse, it’s new. And there, dancing with my baby, I believed it would be better.

Now five years (!) later, so much is new. And more new things are coming. Since then, I quit my job as a learning experience designer to spend more time at home and have more control over my work. We had another kiddo, and I homeschooled our two oldest for half a year. I’ve built a deck, a shed, and two basement bedrooms. I’ve gotten to continue teaching at Cornerstone and spend more time preaching at various churches. And at my home church, I volunteer in sound ministry, men’s ministry, college ministry, and teach an adult Bible class.

So much new. So much good!

This past year, I have been working on a new project that I haven’t talked about much online: going back to school.

I have been accepted to a PhD program and, Lord willing, will be starting there in the fall. It will be long-distance, so not quite everything will be new. But this will be the focus of my life in over the next few years.

I’ll be talking more about which school, what program, etc., in the days and weeks to come.

In the meantime, I’ve been working to make this blog “new” again. I realized I can’t justify two blogs anymore, and that it really wasn’t that healthy to begin with. At first I was responding to pressure, real or perceived, by creating a separate space. Then, I tried to separate a personal blog from a professional blog. But now I see I was still stuck trying to manage an online persona that could please everyone.

I’m working to remedy that now.

I’ve had much that I wanted to write over the past few months, since I stopped blogging regularly in December, but I have been waiting for time to get my websites in order. That day has finally come.

I also have high hopes for overcoming my “besetting sin” as a blogger. For many years now, I have been obsessed with trying to build something big in these spaces, something of an online systematic theology. So if you go through the archives, you will see repeated attempts to start from scratch, some more promising than others. I still have the dream of writing my own systematic theology someday, but I have made peace with the fact that it won’t be here and now.

The spring flowers are blooming. The windows are open again. The city lights are beautiful and calling out.